The Biennial of
the Whitney Museum of American Art is a huge and popular affair
that usually is exasperating and exhausting and crowded with far
too many photographs of little merit. Photographs continue to
be in evidence, albeit without much improvement, this year, but
the 2004 Biennial has some quite interesting and intriguing works
of considerable intellectuality and beauty and impressive technique.
It also has a formidable catalogue filled with many provocative
essays as well as commentary on the artists.

Perhaps the most striking work in this exhibition is "Beetle
Manifesto IV," by Tam Van Tran (b. 1966). This work is made
of staples, chlorophyll, spirulina, pigment, binder, aluminum
foil and paper and measures 92 by 91 by 12 inches. Executed in
2002, it is like a patch from an giant Amazon's tattered evening
dress, gently crumpled and frayed.

The catalogue provides the following commentary about this Vietnamese-born
artist who lives in Redondo Beach, California:

"Tam Van Tran's artworks extend the boundaries of both painting
and drawing, using a range of materials and techniques to create
abstract compositions whose references sweep from the microscopic
to the boundless. His earlier paintings were acrylics on canvas;
more recently, he has placed a greater emphasis on materials,
using crimpled paper, stables, hole punches, and pigments infused
with organic matter such as chlorophyll and spirulina to create
works that often feature wavy protrusions, lending them a sculpture
presence. The combinations of natural and industrial materials
parallels the associations most visible in Tran's works. Earlier
works emphasized fragmented grids of acrylic connected by then
lines, set against uniformly colored backgrounds, which wee inspired
by traditional Chinese landscape painting yet evoked compute networks,
city plans and futuristic architectural structures. Most recent
works, including an ongoing series of large-scale drawings collectively
titled Beetle Manifesto, eschew the space-age references for an
intimate focus on organic matter, conjuring forests, leaves and
microscopic views of cells. For these latter works Tran draws
on large swaths of paper that he cuts into thin strips and then
sutures back together with thousands of staples; irregularities
in the labor-intensive process often warp the artwork and push
his drawings into the third dimension. The arcing tracks of holes
punched into the paper appear as if they were made by the mouths
of the insects implied in the title. The use of natural materials
offers Tran a back-door entry to natural references, while his
art remains engaged with issues of abstract painting. He sees
that the filigreed lines of connectors on a computer chip are
visually similar to human veins or those of leaves. He shifts
back and forth between the industrial and the organic, the abstract
and the representation, and the delicate and the roughly handmade,
holding them all in a protective tension."

"Airborne
Event," by Fred Tomaselli, mixed media, acrylic and resin
on wood, 84 by 60 inches, 2003, lent by the American Fund for
the Tate Gallery and the collection of John and Amy Phelan, fractional
and promised gift

Another "labor-intensive"
work is "Airborne Event," a mixed media, acrylic and
resin on wood by Fred Tomaselli (b. 1956), one of three works
by the artist in the exhibition. A mixed media, acrylic and resin
on wood that measures 84 by 60 inches, it was executed in 2003
and lent by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery and the collection
of John and Amy Phelan, fractional and promised gift.

"Tomaselli," according to the catalogue entry on him,
"arranges pills, leaves, insects, and cutouts of animals
and body parts into deliriously multifaceted patterns and ornate
floral designs. He often incorporates drugs over-the-counter medicine
and prescription pharmaceuticals, as well as street drugs and
marijuana leaves into his compositions, with the patterns and
designs of their arrangement suggesting the expanded fields of
perception and the heightened visual experiences induced by their
consumption....In his most recent works, Tomaselli has expanded
his compositional technique, moving away from pattern based-works
to more figurative compositions, using tiny photocollage elements."

The figurative compositions do not work as well as the pattern
compositions, but they are both impressive.

Four
images from "Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thoms
Pynchon's Novel Gravity Rainbow," by Zak Smith, 755 drawings
in various media, each 5 ½ by 4 ½ inches, 2004,
Collection of the artist; courtesy Fredericks Freiser Gallery,
New York

Easily the most impressive
work in the exhibition is "Pictures of What Happens on Each
Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow," a series
of 755 drawings in various media, each 5 ½ by 4 ½
inches, by Zak Smith (b. 1976). Filling a huge wall at the Whitney,
it is difficult to view each drawing but there is no question
that Smith is a virtuoso draftsman. The drawings are in many different
styles and most are stunning.

"His work," according to the catalogue, "demonstrates
a deconstructed neo-punk aesthetic conversant in comic-book style
drawing, vivid psychedelic coloration, experimental photographic
processes, and traditional draftsmanship.Central to his work is
a balance of seemingly disparate aesthetic modes. Using visual
elements from painting, drawing and photography, Smith achieves
a hybrid effect that vacillates between sober realism and electrifying
abstraction. Many of these individual images have also appeared
as decorative backdrops for Smith's portrait works, calling attention
to a sense of play between these different modes of representation."

Hopefully some publisher will publish an edition of Pynchon's
novel with all of Smith's drawings. Many of the very small drawings
are very, very detailed. Smith is very, very talented.

"Empirical
Construction, Istanbul," by Julie Mehretu, ink and acrylic
on canvas, 120 by 180 inches, 2003, collection of the artist,
courtesy The Project, New York and Los Angeles

The multiplicity of Smith's
images is mind-boggling. Julie Mehretu (b. 1970) is another mind-blower.
Her 2003 "Empirical Construction, Istanbul," an ink
and acrylic on canvas that measures 120 by 180 inches, is a labyrinthine
tour de force of great dynamics.

The catalogue provides the following commentary about this artist:

"Julie Mehretu's complex paintings and drawings layer and
compress data gleaned from our media-saturated lives into coolly
rendered, mostly abstract compositions. Architectural plans, newspaper
clippings, mall escalators, cartoon fragments, maps, and graffiti
morph into points, lines, planes of color, arrows, and small explosions.
Despite incorporating as many as six layers of acrylic paint,
silica, vellum, rapidograph pen marks, and other materials on
each canvas, the works remain diaphanous, reminding us that much
of what she renders in intangible. Her busy tableaux evoke the
methods through which data, people, and money now travel across
continents with unparalleled ease. A multitude of small energy
flows and interactions take place, leading the viewer's eye across
each composition as we attempt to pick out recognizable fragments.
There is a political aspect to Mehretu's investigation of how
local and international structures, economic or otherwise, almost
invariably represent specific ideologies. Retopistics: A Renegade
Excavation (2001) combines renderings of sports stadiums,
airport plans, city buildings, and grand staircases, flattening
hierarchies among them to present a cacophony of organic lines
and shards of color. Excerpt (Paradigm) (2003) lays expressive
brushstrokes over city maps of the capitals of every country in
Africa."

"Double
Recursive Combs (red and black)," by James Siena, enamel
on aluminum, 29 1/16 by 22 11/16 inches, 2002, Collection of David
and Nancy Frej; courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee, New York

One of the most elegant
works is "Double Recursive Combs (red and black)," is
an enamel on aluminum by James Siena (b. 1957). The 29 1/16-by-22
11/16-inch work was executed in 2002 and is in the collection
of David and Nancy Frej. "Attempting to simultaneously retain
the gap between conception instruction and manual execution,"
the catalogue noted, "and to critically respond to abstraction's
demand for a self-referential formal procedure, Siena employs
diverse strategies to produce complex structures that further
his personal exploration of the definitions of visual language."

While Siena's algorithmic abstractions are in the Minimalist tradition,
they have more color, density, substance and beauty than similar
compositions by such artists as Agnes Martin.

"Hamlet,"
by Amy Sillman, oil on canvas, 72 by 84 inches, 2002, Whitney
Museum of American Art, purchase, with funds from the Contemporary
Committee

"Hamlet" by Amy
Sillman is a strong and vibrant oil on canvas that measures 72
by 84 inches and was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American
Art last year.

The catalogue provides the following commentary on this work:

"Hamlet reveals Sillman's interest in novel representations
of landscapes. The multiple horizon lines depicted in the work
act as a nonlinear narrative device, allowing the painting to
be read both from left to right and top to bottom. In the uppermost
level, a town or hamlet emerges from the body of a sleeping hermaphrodite
(with an erect phallus) whose profile is integrated into the land.
For the artists, this level represents fertility, life, and hope,
dominated by bright curving lines tightly packed together, that
flows into the middle passage. Sillman's use of dark blues and
grays and impastoed rectilinear forms in this section evoke a
dense, compacted sense of space and refer to conflicted psychological
state. The head of the figure lying at the base of the layer,
his body a thin red line dividing the canvas, consists of a yellow
clock face, whose disarrayed numbers allude to time in a state
of chaos. In the bottom register, a third figure lies face down.
The head explodes in bursts of color, representing death and decay.
The three layers in the work bring to mind frames of a filmstrip.
Taken together, the framed spaces suggest a physical passage from
life to death, and a psychological journey from hope to despair.
Oscillating between varying psychological states, the cartoonlike
characters in Sillman's Hamlet can be seen as both tragic
and comic, not unlike those in many of Shakespeare's plays, in
particular the one referenced in the painting's title."

Although this composition is confusing, the central section is
particularly striking and conjures a crystalline and very dense
Yves Tanguy world.

A nice visual companion
piece to Sillman's "Hamlet" might be a large untitled
work by Lecia Dole-Recio (b. 1971). The 2003 work consists of
paper, vellum, tape and gouache and measures 84 by 94 ½
inches and is in the artist's collection.

"Dole-Recio's use of a knife is key," the catalogue
maintains, adding that "She begins by taping or pasting together
several layers of cardboard, butcher paper, watercolor paper,
or vellum and painting of drawing over the top layer. Then she
hand-carves geometric holes into the surface, revealing the various
strata and giving her work an optical depth. The cutout circles,
squares, and rhomboids slightly smaller than the holes they came
from, are then imperfectly pasted back into the composition and
painted over. The many rows of these incisions form loose grids
across the surface.Dole-Recio's labor-intensive process bridges
traditional categories of art-making. A sculptural cutout that
makes a shadow by pushing away from the surface of one artwork
may simply be a drawn or painted representation of a shadow on
the next. This element of surprise encourages the viewer to consider
each work more fully. Dole-Recio's visual gamesmanship merges
material and process to ensure that her abstract works are not
always what they seem."

A nice, arresting companion
piece to the untitled Dole-Recio is "Dreamcatcher,"
a mixed media work by Katie Grinnan (b. 1970), much of which is
suspended from a ceiling. It depicts "an upside-down forest
scene consisting of photographs shaped as vegetation, rope and
electrical wire fashioned into vines, and corduroy fabric arranged
as mud on the floor," according to the catalogue. "Incorporating
photographs of rain forests, deserts and lawns, the installation
is a sculptural abstraction representing Grinnan's memories of
traveling in Costa Rica as well as her surroundings in California,"
it added.

Notions of chaos and detritus
are evident in "Ten Yards," a mixed-media work by Rob
Fischer (b. 1968) enclosed in a glass-walled dumpster that measures
54 by 174 by 80 inches. This dumpster is very neatly packed with
furniture and house parts and no evidence of dust and dirt normally
associated with non-glass-walled dumpsters. One could argue that
an empty glass-walled dumpster might well be a strong artistic
statement.

The catalogue provides the following interesting commentary on
the artist:

"Rob Fischer's sculptures balance mobility and the desire
for escape with an inextricable bond to place. Often made from
parts of transport vehicles in the past he has used airplane wings,
flatbed trucks, boats, and trailers and scrap materials, his psychologically
fraught assemblages make reference to architectural structures
outside the gallery spaces in which they are exhibited. Unmoored
from a landscape in which they might provide shelter, Fischer's
sculptures do not quite reach architectural scale: they toe the
line between disciplines as improvised, semi-inhabitable discrete
objects. Viewers can enter his constructions, which are often
created on-site and modified during the course of an exhibition,
but they are given only piecemeal clues as to the works' fitness
for human habitation. Instead, the ram-shackle dwellings' shortage
of domestic trappings suffuses Fischer's art with an uneasy bleakness.Fischer's
constructions are made entirely by hand, often reusing or recycling
elements from earlier pieces, and the history of each scrap or
spare part is embedded within the works. Their pathetic strivings
toward mobility suggest a desire to shake off the burden of place;
they fail not only as habitable constructions but also as a means
of escape. Fischer's unsettling, enigmatic sculptures look toward
a future laden with the aura of his materials' past lives and
the places from which they have come."

"Fireflies
on the Water," installation with 150 lights, mirrors and
water, by Yayoi Kusama

There are several room installations
in the exhibition and the most dazzling is "Fireflies on
the Water," by Yayoi Kasuma (b. 1929), a 2002 installation
that measures 115 by 144 by 144 inches and consists of mirrored
walls, 150 lights and water. It has been purchased by the Whitney
Museum of American Art with funds from the Postwar Committee and
the Contemporary Committee and partial gift of Betsy Wittneborn
Miller.

The catalogue provides the following commentary about the artist:

"Since the late 1950s, Yayoi Kusama has used painting, performance,
sculpture, and installation to develop a highly personal formal
vocabulary that combines repetitive elements such as net and dot
patterns with organic and often eroticized sculptural forms. Her
early paintings and collages extend the language of Abstract Expressionism
and its concern for allover compositions into an intimate form
of gridded space. By the early 1960s Kusama had begun to produce
her Accumulations everyday objects such as chairs, tables, and
clothes densely covered with hand-sewn, phallic protrusions. Around
the same time, Kusama began to paint net and dot patterns onto
household items, and in 1965 she combined all these elements in
the installation Infinity Mirror Room Phalli's Field (or
Floor Show). In Infinity Mirror Room a dense field
of polka-dotted phallic protrusions extended from the floor of
an enclosed space. The walls of the environment were lined with
mirrors, leaving only a small passageway into the center of the
installation empty. For the installation Kusama's Peep Show
(1966), the artist constructed a room whose walls and ceiling
were covered with mirrors, while the floor was densely filled
with glowing electric lightbulbs in different colors. Two small
windows allowed the viewer and Kusama to peer inside. Continuing
her obsessive, almost psychedelic approach, the installations
suggest a kaleidoscopic mode of perception, in which interior
rooms contain unbound, seemingly endless spaces. By the late 1960s,
Kusama began to stage performances, sometimes covering her naked
body, or others' bodies, with patterns. In the early 1970s, Kusama
returned to Tokyo; she voluntarily entered a clinic for the mentally
ill, where she has remained ever since. She has continued to produce
work at a prolific rate, remarkable in its consistency. Her obsessive
arrangements, her often radically eroticized alterations of everyday
objects, her fascination with infinity, and the all-encompassing
nature of her work have remained at the core of her production.
In her most recent works Kusame continues to create reflective
interior environments. Fireflies on the Water (2002) consists
of a small room lined with mirrors on all sides, a pool in the
center of the space, and 150 small lights hanging from the ceiling,
creating a dazzling effect of direct and reflected light, emanating
from both the mirrors and the water's surface. Fireflies embodies
an almost hallucinatory approach to reality, while shifting the
mood from her earlier, more unsettling installations toward a
more ethereal, almost spiritual experience."

Another quite beautiful
and delicate work is "Everything will Happen," a cut
chromogenic color print, 72 by 48 inches, by Jim Hodges (b. 1957)
from the Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection: courtesy CRG Gallery,
New York. Unfortunately the catalogue reproduction does not do
it justice as the cut white leaves appear in three dimensions
almost like blossoms.

"Jim Hodges's sculptures and drawings transform simple, ordinary
materials into beautiful, accessible objects that allude to both
the evanescence and persistence of life," according to Debra
Singer's catalogue comments. "In his poetry of the everyday,
slowness is literalized as Hodges tries to mark and track time
through meticulously crafted work: fine brass chains are linked
together to form progressions of delicate spider webs, silk flowers
are stitched together into vibrant hanging fields, mirrors are
hand-cut and reassembled into patterned mosaics, photographs of
trees mutate into sculptural 'drawings' as the outlines of leaves
are partially cut out and left to dangle as tendrils."

In his preface to the exhibition catalogue, Adam D. Weinberg,
Alice Pratt Brown director of the Whitney wrote that "This
Biennial in part takes its cue from the cultural climate of post-9/11
America and reveals tendencies that the exhibition's three curators
Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer have perceived
through their assiduous and attentive consideration of art of
the last two years." "With ears to the ground and, more
important, eyes on the work, the curators extrapulated from the
art to develop the ideas behind this exhibition. While the Biennial
represents the work of individual visions, it is also more than
that. Given that the curators themselves come from somewhat different
generations, it is not surprising that the leitmotif of this Biennial
is intergenerational dialogue, a conversion that is based on distinct
commonalities and threads of influence extending in both directions
from older to younger artists, and vice versa."

In their introduction to the catalogue, the curators wrote that:

"the 2004 Biennial suggests that another significant sea
change in contemporary art may be under way. This change has arguably
been catalyzed by the seismic global political and economic shifts
that took place throughout the nineties, culminating in the events
of September 11, 2001, and its continuing aftermath, which marking
the beginning of a new millennium. During the early 2000s we have
witnessed a rejection of the excessive values of the late 1990s:
a conspicuous consumption that dwarfed that of the 1980s; scandals
of corporate greed; the dot-com collapse; a crisis in the world
financial system; and an unprecedented interdependence in the
political and economic landscape. Whereas the early 1990s embraced
the end of the cold war and looked towards a new, highly technologized
future with optimism, the current economic, political, social,
and artistic climate is dominated by anxiety, fear, and an uncertainty
whether this generation is up to the daunting challenges posed
by this new present. While not necessarily reflected in the content
of the art we saw, the dramatic social and political upheaval
of the past two years has clearly triggered a profound response
among artists of all ages. If the body became a major subject
in the 1990s as its materiality was challenged by the virtual
space of technology, in the following years it has reasserted
itself as a relentlessly physical presence, manifested with renewed
intensity in the painted mark, the drawn line, and new ways of
defining surface, image, geographical location, and social space.
An engagement with process, and a desire for immediacy and intimate
communication are present throughout the show, in work that is
by turns fantastical, political, obsessive, formal, abstract,
and narrative. A certain modesty and an interest in low-tech materials
and media, whether in painting, drawing or film suggest a reaction
against the highly produced slickness of the late 1990s and an
increasingly skeptical attitude toward technology and the utopian
hopes for its positive global impact. Many of the Biennial artists
mine references ranging from science fiction to fairy tales, comic
books to music culture, creating a fluid, emancipated space for
the imagination. Their work is characterized by the mapping of
an invented interior world, or the metaphorical exploration of
the abstract, nonlinear environment of cyberspace, to investigate
new belief structures that might replace those of the contemporary
world that appear increasingly bankrupt."

In her catalogue essay, "The Way Things Never Were: Nostaglia's
Possibilities and the Unpredictable Past," curator Debra
Singer wrotes that:

"That the late 1960s and early 1970s have become such an
important touchstone for younger artists should not seem so unexpected.
It is arguably the last political decade a period when civic activism
and popular culture merged on a massive public scale. By delving
into the aesthetics and events of this earlier period, artists
displace contemporary problems, anxieties and hopes into visual
lexicons borrowed from a psychologically more remote past, rendered
less traumatic with the passing of time. The artists' various
methods for incorporating historical references can be understood
within a continuum of earlier postmodern art practice based on
tactics of appropriation. Many artists from the late 1970s and
early 1980s made work that directly referred to other images borrowed
from advertisements or films and was primarily concerned with
questioning notions of artistic originality and authenticity.
Similar to these precursors, much new work today seeks to replace
and supplant previous meanings of the appropriated imagery while
tending to take on a different set of issues and references than
their artistic precedents. However, today, new tactics of appropriation
are often characterized by a far greater specificity of cultural
or political reference that was generally present in the earlier
work, and the artists tend to employ labor-intensive processes
that emphasize the materiality of the art object and convey a
more intimate style of direct address.

There are numerous video
works in the exhibition, but most seem monotonous and indulgent
with the exception of "Reading Ossie Clark," a fine
nine-minute work by Jeremy Blake (b. 1971) that is in the collection
of Ellen and Steve Susman. Ossie Clark was a British fashion designer
in the 1960s and excerpts from his diary are read by "art
world doyenne Clarissa Dalrymble, as a sequence of almost psychedelic
images morph into one another. Details of Clarks's fabrics designed
by Celia Birtwell appear in bright colors that evoke the multicolored
lettering of Clark's diary, in which each word or phrase was written
in a different-colored ink."